The developers of Global Agenda have been taking a long look at player feedback over the past months, particularly that regarding Warzones in the game, and they've come to a decision. It's certainly not one that players were expecting, though.

Hi-Rez Studios CEO Erez Goren announced today that the company is the "proud new owner of the Tribes franchise." The company now has two teams in the studio, one devoted to Tribes Universe, which is expected to enter alpha testing at the beginning of 2011.

The first week since launch over 500,000 new players have registered for fantasy MMORPG, Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning (WAR), in North America, Europe and the Oceanic territories. EA's most highly pre-ordered PC title, WAR has now become the fastest-selling new MMO of all time.

""In just one week we have a half a million people playing WAR online, and the ranks of Order and Destruction are growing at a record-breaking pace for a new MMORPG," said Mark Jacobs, co-founder and general manager of Mythic Entertainment. "We spent years working to provide players with the most stable, epic, and polished online world we could, but it is the players that have truly brought the Age of Reckoning to life."

The exclusive edition was announced in January, and has since topped retail charts at numerous retailers. In some markets, the Collector s Edition has been sold out for weeks, and as a result additional boxes were made. These are also sold out, and the total print run stands at 111.000 units...

Your basic initial attack is fire, sound familiar? It's not. I was thinking "big deal, another fire mage" nope. First of all, when you torch an enemy and they grab their head, visually write in pain, audibly scream in agony omigod adrenaline rush. I'm sorry to my fellow healers, but there was joy...

For more concrete benefits, several of the buildings grant benefits to all members of a class or archetype in your guild. Build a Temple and your priests will all grow tougher, while a Thieves Guild will help all your rogues get sneakier and stabbier.

I rolled myself a Priestess of Mitra. So lets start with character creation. Overall I thought the variety of options for customizing my character was quite high. I wont say Im in love with the final product. I guess guys will be thrilled with the ability to make a hot body for the female avatars. I was not so thrilled with my best efforts to make a cute face. I realize this is not a huge issue, I am merely providing feedback in the order in which I experienced each aspect. I know the Hyborian life was a tough one so the people probably werent overly cute anyway. This was only cosmetic and not a big deal.

Some of you may remember Red 5 Studios. The studio that hired Scott 'Cornboy!' Youngblood of Tribes 1 fame for their unannounced MMO. Scott hinted that fans of Tribes will love the new game. Well, Red 5 has now added ex-Oracle Executive Michael Weingartner. And here's what he had to say...

Said Weingartner, "There are intriguing parallels between building an innovative MMO server system and the work I was able to accomplish at Oracle. I've been influenced by a number of hit games, including the Tribes series, StarCraft, and Dark Age of Camelot. Combining my past technological experience with my passion for gaming is something I've wanted to do for years, and at Red 5, I have the opportunity."

With so many fantasy MMOs on the market and in development, games within that segment that stand out are highly prized by the dedicated gamer set. Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures, from Anarchy Online developer Funcom, has long been awaited as one such game, with its dark, adult-oriented world.

Challenging the notion that web-based games must cater to a casual audience, Ubisoft today announced a massively multiplayer web-based game set in the Heroes of Might and Magic Universe. Titled Heroes of Might and Magic Kingdoms, the browser-based game will launch this coming spring.

Once again, job listings looking for artists to work on a "Next-Gen MMO" at Blizzard caused speculation in the community forums to run rampant. But this time, a Blizzard staffer responded to the flurry of hypotheses from forum posters, confirming that the game is not a World of Warcraft expansion.

"No, it is an unannounced Next-Gen MMO," the Blizzard rep said in response to a post stating the additional employees could be used for the Wrath of the Lich King expansion. "And that doesn't mean an expansion for World of Warcraft either."